Thankful

It wasn't long after, maybe a month, that I picked up a book.  I was still swimming in the mire, crying uncontrollably, dehydrated, Dance Macabre filling my nightmares, heavy empty arms and leaky breasts consuming my days, all the while thinking:  I am at the bottom.  I am in the trash compactor of hell.  This is as bad as it gets.

And I began reading other stories of moms like me.

And found myself, surprisingly -- not often, but occasionally -- thinking:  wow, how horrible, I can't imagine, I'm so glad that didn't happen to me.

It's odd to be scraping the barrel and finding yourself giving thanks, but there I was reading about mothers who were denied the right to see or hold their children.  Women who were hustled along by the nurses who neglected to give those mothers what was rightfully theirs:  footprints, handprints, locks of hair.  Worse (to me), women drugged by doctors thinking they would appreciate sleeping through the process.  

If some maternal being, even a fellow babyloss mama, came to me, embraced me against her (lavender scented) bosom, clasped my hands in hers and pressed them to her heart, and earnestly implored me while looking tearfully into my eyes:

"Tell me what you're thankful for!"

I would probably scream, "Not a fucking thing," while cramming both our fists down her throat.  There is nothing here to be thankful for, not my child's sorry little life, and the unbearable year and half since.  Not the loss of my daughter's sibling, not watching my husband grieve.  Nothing.

Bite me.

And yet, late at night, while reading through your blogs and comments and words, I often catch my breath, mutter "Oh Shit," and think

It could have been so much worse.

I am thankful I married my husband -- I honestly can't imagine going through this with anyone less than or other than him.

I am thankful Maddy was born where she was, in this town where we had recently moved, and died in Children's -- which was recently rated one of the top Children's hospitals in the country.  They did not give me any answers, but they did not leave me with any doubt to her care, and their complete expenditure of resources and attention in trying to figure out what happened.  Her medical care was unparalleled.  Had Maddy been born in my local hospital, or in the hospital in my former state, we would be left with shrugged shoulders, and undoubtedly, "there's no way of knowing, nothing we can do."

I am thankful for Maddy's nurses.  They deserve capes and fancy wrist bands and theme music -- superheroes, all.

I am thankful my labor was quick, my recovery effortless.  I was on my feet immediately for a week of walking, crouching, sobbing, all away from home, my water bath and fancy salts and hemorrhoid cream.  And physically I was fine.

I am thankful I have pictures, even if they're not good quality.  The one with her clenched fist -- which is a sign of seizure, although I choose to forget that when I look at it -- is my favorite.  I choose to believe she's fighting.

I am thankful she died at Children's, where there was a bereavement department.  Someone spoke to us the day she died, and they kept calling.  They sent a specialist to talk to us about Bella, and had a lactation staff who dealt with ending it -- on a Sunday.  They sent us things we didn't know they had kept.  They still call.  They organize a yearly candlelight service.  She is not forgotten to them, and it makes it so much easier to drive by the hospital -- which I do on a weekly basis.

I am thankful for a small, but strong handful of friends who wrote me, emailed me, called and left messages for me -- when I didn't correspond back.  They didn't care, they didn't ask why, they just kept calling, writing, emailing.  They kept me from drowning.

I'm thankful Maddy's nervous system was determined to be mush.  She most likely felt nothing during her week here.  That relieves me more than you can imagine.

Most of all, I'm thankful I got to set the terms of Maddy's death, and that given what transpired that dreadful week, this one moment, at least, was in our control.  Of course I didn't really control it all, who am I kidding -- when a doctor says "she's being kept alive," basically the universe spirals out of control right from under your seat.  Sometimes I wonder if I could've done things differently, but ultimately she died in our arms.  Given all that happened that week, I don't want to contemplate her end happening in any other way.

Maddy dying is by far the worst thing that has ever happened to me.  And yet, I realize, it could've been so, so much worse.  And I'm oh so thankful that it wasn't.

In retrospect, comparatively speaking (or perhaps not at all), are you at all, remotely, even a teeny bit thankful for anything that happened surrounding the death of your baby/-ies?  And believe me, it's fine if you say "No.  Not a fucking thing.  Are you crazy?"

no dominion

Just for a second, I saw them, as if in a child's picture book or one of those Anne Geddes baby-as-cauliflower-type photo montages.  Legion, the lot of them.  Some in crisp black and white, Rogers and Nancys with white, salt-crusted headstones, all little lambs and angels.  Others were more Technicolour, like the garish, blurry snapshots of my own childhood...a Jason, a Robin, a "beloved baby boy".  One, much newer, I recognized; the newborn girl with the hole in her heart, the first baby I ever knew who died.  Across the sweeping hill in the older part of the cemetery I could see their compatriots...almost too many to count, dim and sepia, names obscured or hopelessly ancient, buried with young mothers or the siblings who followed in a series like stepping stones of sorrow.  For a second in the peace of the cemetery, I could see them all, each one a story, a whole life anticipated, condensed to a few dates and letters on a stone.  Each one a silent, plaintive testament to thethreshold we living things must traverse...into life, some way or another, and out.  For too many, the challenge insurmountable, the dates identical, cut short.

I do not go to the cemetery very often.  My own child is not there...we cremated him, still hoard the ashes in our bedroom with ambivalence, unsure of how to stage a letting go.  But I have known this place since my earliest years, when the grandmother whose bones lie here was alive and the guardian of the family stones, and I her charge, her companion in the regular pilgrimages of caregiving.  I fetched water from the old pump and dragged it to black, faded headstones of people even she barely remembered, fetched again and helped water the graves of her husband and brother and parents, all gone before I'd been born.  I listened and learned my family history in this place. 

While she weeded, though, I ran wild...and it was the childrens' graves that fascinated me.  I spun stories to myself about the children they represented, these names on the small stones.  I knew them, could have led a tour around the cemetery from Douglas to "wee Elmer" - though I was agog at the idea that an infant had ever been named Elmer - through the ones whose names were already crumbled away.  Rapt with the morbidity of childhood, I wondered about them all, spoke to them, flitted amongst them w eekly through years of summer afternoons while my grandmother tended the geraniums of people I'd never meet.

I drove through the cemetery on a whim, Friday, nearby and suddenly guilty because my grandmother has no geraniums to mark her place, now.  I stopped, and stood by her grave, staring at her name on the headstone, assessing...her name will be one of my daughter's names when this child crosses the threshold into whatever awaits.  I spoke to her, then, my grandmother, though I do not believe she's really there...spoke with love and awkwardness mixed, like a shy suitor.  I speak to Finn the same way, self-conscious; I do better listening for the dead than trying to hold up my end of the conversation.  Then I sat down by my grandmother's grave and drifted for a minute, feeling closer to her in calling up memories of her hands in the soil beside me.

That's when I saw them, all the babies.  My eyes caught on the first stone, three rows back and a few over, where it always was. It is a baby's stone, one where the dates, like Finn's, are only a day apart.   Nearly sixty years old now, that story, that loss.  I realized that the parents of that child are probably long dead themselves now, gone beyond whatever remained of their sorrow to the same side of the threshold as the baby they marked with a sandstone lamb.  And I looked to the left, where I knew the next stone would be, and suddenly for that one moment I felt like I could see them all, every one of them laid here, too small or too sick or just gone for no reason anyone will ever know.  They were neither beautiful angels nor objects of sorrow, of absence...just babies and children, real for a moment.  And time, finally, seemed to have made peace with them.

I wonder if, sixty years from now, when we here are mostly just memory, if the sting of our stories will go with us...if the words we leave here will bear witness only to love, to moments lived?

I long for that.

angry

In theory, I understand it.  It's a shield and a sword.  Protection from the knife-sharp comments or the knife-sharp silence and a blade you can turn against them.  It's the panther that walks with you, straining against its slender leash.  It's a Molotov cocktail.  It's a loaded gun.  

But, in theory, I understand a lot of things.  In practice, I wonder about the burden anger can be.

I don't generally get angry, even when, perhaps, I should.  Once upon a time, the man I couldn't imagine life without and the woman who knew all my secrets found each other and left me completely alone.   "You must be so angry at them,"  people would say. 

But I wasn't angry at all.  I was sad, terribly sad, so sad that I had to force myself to breathe, but I understood why they had done what they did and, more importantly, understood that, they hadn't really done anything to me. 

So it's hard for me to even imagine the rage that so often seems to swirl around the death of a child.  You could be angry at yourself, the doctors, your husband, your friends with healthy babies, the gods, the sunlight on the garden, the earth that spins in its monotonous circles as if nothing at all had happened.  But it all seems so meaningless, so futile, like being angry at a coin for coming up heads when you wanted it to be tails. 

You could be angry at other people's reactions.  People generally don't respond well to loss and say and do all the wrong things.  But, for the most part, they're not being malicious, just selfish and thoughtless.  And, while, sometimes, some people surprise you, expecting people not to be selfish and thoughtless is expecting far too much.

Sadness makes sense to me.  Anger -- at least anger at a loss --often, well, doesn't.  And, while I know there are emotions that transcend reason and that anger can be a force for healing, what I think about is the fable of the miller, who got rid of the mice that were stealing his flour by burning down the mill.

Your turn.  Tell me why I'm wrong.  Have you felt anger in the wake of a loss -- whether the loss of a child or some other loss?  What was it like?  Who or what were you angry with?  Was your anger an additional burden or a source of strength or comfort? 

amnesia

Counting the months on my fingers – November, December, January – I realize that it’s been more than a year and a half since the twins died. That's a long time, but, apparently, not quite long enough. When I sum up what I've been doing since it happened, I decide that, mostly, I've been trying to teach myself to forget.

Back when I started my blog, a commenter named Julie suggested that I take a look at the end of Deuteronomy 25, pointing to the verses about the Amalekites, a tribe who attacked the Jews following the exodus from Egypt: Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you came out of Egypt . . . you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget.

Though Julie had no way of knowing, this was one of the biblical passages that, as children, my brother and I found particularly hilarious. We even developed a whole who's-on-first routine about it.

--Remember, one of us would say, you need to blot out their memory.

--Blot out whose memory? the other would ask, eyebrows scrunched in mock confusion.

--You know who.

--Just remind me.

--You need to forget the Amalekites. The Amalekites. The A-mal-e-kites, Forget the Amalekites. Remember to forget the Amalekites.

--Okay. I've got it. I'm forgetting the Amalekites.

Pause.

--Wait. I can't remember. Remind me again. Who was I supposed to forget?

But remembering to forget turns out not to be a contradiction in terms. If you can't erase the past through an act of will, you can obscure it, soften its sharp edges, dim the spotlights, mute the voices. Back at the beginning, when I was terrified that that I'd never be able to escape the words and pictures in my head, I deliberately questioned each of my recollections, cast doubt on every memory as it surfaced. Was I in the hospital for two weeks or three? What did the social worker suggest that I do? After a while, I couldn't be sure. And I feel fortunate that there's no anniversary date for me to dread, because I can no longer remember exactly when they were born.

I realize that many people, most people, perhaps, want something different, want, in fact, the exact opposite. But I sometimes wonder if remembrance causes more pain than it eases. And despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, I tell myself that if I had a way of blotting out all memory of the twins from under heaven, I would do without a second thought.

Here's the thing. Imagine you're on a ship setting sail. For a while you can still decipher the expressions on the faces of the people standing behind you, crowded together on the dock. Eventually, though, the expressions, the faces, the people, and the dock itself shrink, blur, run together. More and more, your attention turns to the grey sky and the greyer water in front of you. The waves curl white and you take out a chart and run your finger across it. On shore, everyone is eating dinner at their own tables in their own houses. The dock is empty and no-one is watching, wondering if it's really true that the tips of the sails are the last part of the ship to vanish beneath the horizon. Even if you looked back, there would be nothing to see.

my son may be in your vacuum cleaner

Seriously. You may wanna go check.

Ferdinand was cremated. There is a possibility that some of his ashes, minute particles of them, escaped the plastic bag that it was supposed to be loaded into and tied firmly and then placed in a plastic box and then a velvet bag and then handed over to us with sympathies.

Some of the ashes may have flown undetected onto the floor of the crematorium and carried about by the shoes of the good guy who helped us cremate our son. Maybe some tiny particles of my son’s ashes got onto the good guy’s shoes and it got thumped off at the post office when he went in to get his mail and some of the dirt was sucked up by the ventilator which re-circulated it into the mailroom and got shuffled into the mail and then got stuck onto a part of an envelope and maybe that envelope is somewhere in your house.

When his ashes arrived in Singapore, at the temple, and they were emptied, from plastic bag to urn, and the breeze, almost ever-present, might have swept up a whiff of the ashes, and they got mixed into the food being prepared for the temple lunch. Or, it got stuck onto somebody’s sweaty arms (it is very humid there) and got carried all over the small island-state, or that somebody got onto an airplane headed for the Swiss Alps and so a part of Ferdinand ended up in a different continent. Have you had a guest recently? Check their shoes, you may find my son.

Before he was cremated, I held him, hugged him tight, and kissed him. Tried to make an imprint on him and tried to engrave his body onto mine. Maybe some of his skin cells were brushed off and stuck on to me, for a few seconds. Then, they may have fallen onto the floor, and got swept out of the funeral home as we exited. The wind from the hills may have swept those cells up, carried them across the country, and dumped them somewhere on the East coast.

The dust may have fallen into your house when you opened your door or your window. You decided to vacuum the house. And there he goes, into your vacuum cleaner.

Or, a few molecules of my son’s ashes may be fertilizing your tomatoes right this very second.

I do sound like I am spinning a tall tale, aint’t I?

Except, we know that everyday the world is on the move, in every sense, whether you take the macro- or micro-view. Foods are transported over long distances, and with them, dust. Air circulates, moves over distances, taking sounds and smells and small tiny particles, including human ashes, with them.

Dust is very tiny. Anything smaller then one-sixteenth of a millimeter in diameter can be defined as dust. They come from everywhere and from anything- dirt, pollen grains, tire rubber, salt sprays from the ocean, skin flakes, fire ashes, volcanic eruptions, desert sands, animal fur, and, let’s not forget about cosmic dust. You may have star dust in your vacuum cleaner too.

When a supernova explodes, it sends small particles of dust far out into space, and some of this dust falls on Earth. You may find some of these cosmic dust particles inside your nostrils.

What is more fascinating is that you cannot destroy dust. You dust, vacuum and sweep, and pour everything into your garbage can and think it is good riddance when the garbage truck rolls around on Monday morning. Well, some of that dust is still on your driveway because when the garbage gets dumped, air gets moved and the air moved the dust too. Rumor is, dust from the dinosaurs still remains, because there is no way you can destroy dust. They move around, get mixed into things of all sorts; things break down, and the dust re-surfaces again.

Come to think of it, dust is a beautiful thing. And so indestructible. So durable, it is forever. Forever swirling around. Here, in my house; there, in your house; on earth, over earth; in the vast Universe, and probably beyond too. Ferdinand, my baby, in my current system of belief, is part ashes, part dust, part soul and part spirit. And so he may well be everywhere right now.

Perhaps in your vacuum cleaner, too.

I will never look at the world the same way again. I will never see dust the same way ever again.

the crack in everything

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack, a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen

I heard the lines above last night, a melodic crescendo, and was stunned into reverie. Down to the sour smell of smoke and sawdust that were in the air that night, I was, for a moment, transported viscerally to the time and place they'd last crossed my consciousness.  Three summers ago, almost.  With old friends, gathered from our scattered points around the globe, for a weekend of talk and wine and beer.  It was nine weeks after he died.  I was supposed to be thirty-five weeks pregnant for that visit: instead, I was raw, raging, humbled...unmoored.  but with those friends I felt comparatively safe and we talked about him, a little, and they talked about him, a little, and there was no sweeping under the carpet and I felt freed by that, grateful...even welcomed the strangely soothing balm of the eight month old boy one couple had in tow.  The group of them were some touchstone of normal - of the me I had been before - in a time when there was none, elsewhere in my life. 

But then Leonard's voice broke in through light chatter and mild drunkenness on the second night of our gathering. ring the bells that still can ring, he intoned, gravelly and sage.  and suddenly I was choking on smoke and tears, and I bolted from my chair and went stumbling across the yard in the darkness, almost blind.  What fucking bells?   Seriously, what bells were left?  I was broken.

I'd lost my job along with my child.  I was struggling to find a place in a community we'd moved to only months before, struggling to find other work, struggling to get up the courage to leave the sanctuary of the house on a daily basis.   I was a parentless child and a jobless professional...and we'd left our old life behind on another continent to come home and have a baby.  Without that baby, I could not figure out how to go forward.

I'd been, I think, in the denial stage of my grief.  I looked back to my friends in the circle of light on the deck, and realized, there really is no going back to normal.  fuck me gently.  And then I went inside and mixed myself a Southern Comfort Janis Joplin would've been proud of, and sat, numb, staring, bewildered.
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The thing about grief - and in particular, the keening loss that was deadbaby grief for me - that blew my mind was how it robbed me of any clue about how to continue to live my life in a meaningful way.  I understood, factually, that I still had a reasonable semblance of a life, if one in a bit of a shambles at the time - but I could not connect to it.  I groped for the bells left to me to ring and came up clutching air.  It wasn't the overabundance of a sheltered life in my previous incarnation, either, that left me so bereft even of my self, of my survival instinct, my resilience: I'd been violated before, just by living...betrayed, divorced, disappointed, grieved.   But I'd never been stopped up short.

I wonder, sometimes, what it must have been like to grieve a child back in the days of our great-grandmothers, when infant death and pregnancy loss were common and maternal death a fairly regular outcome of childbearing.  I imagine it was still a lonely, isolated thing for many, particularly given the stiff upper lip with which loss would've been expected to be met in many communities and circumstances.   And yet...other than the fact that fewer of us would be present in this company of mourners, lost as we would have been along with our babies...there would have been one key difference between then and now: we would not, could not, have gone into pregnancy without realizing that a loss of this scale was very possible.

I realize, finally, three years on, that that has been the crack in everything, for me.

That pregnancy was fraught with bleeding from the early days.  At six weeks, I was told I was probably miscarrying, and sent home on bedrest.  It felt surreal, but not shocking.  I knew women miscarried.  I knew a number of women who had miscarried.  My partner had already lost two, with his first wife, so I understood full well that the risk of that loss was part of the bargain I'd gotten myself into.  But when the bleeding resolved and the docs said all clear and I sailed past fourteen weeks with no further complications and a perfectly normal ultrasound, I was naive enough to believe that I was pretty much going to be bringing a baby home.  I wasn't sure that baby might not have some minor health issues or delays...I worked in special ed, I knew not every child fits every norm, but to even consider seriously that my baby might die seemed beyond dramatic, frivolous, macabre. 

Such are the miracle assumptions modern science has taught us to espouse.  All other truths and possibilities - especially those that involve dead babies, unsavable, for no apparent reason - are silenced in the mainstream discourse surrounding pregnancy and birth, these days.  There is no norm left to us, and so we are unwelcome and awkward and exposed in the societal conversation surrounding how babies are made, marginalized because we can be, because medicine has made us anachronisms, relics.  

In retrospect, I see now that I've dealt with every other sorrow that's come my way in life by telling myself I expected it.  Each time, it was at least somewhat true.  Nature and experience shaped me as a cynic of sorts, a Cassandra, attuned to the emotional and relational roadbumps that littered most of the paths I ever chose.  I got wounded along the way, but seldomly truly surprised.  And that helped.  It didn't assuage the pain, not necessarily in the moment, but it left me semi-intact, with bells held in reserve still to be rung.  Until I was blindsided by the death of a child who had at least a 75% chance of survival even at the moment of his untimely birth, I had never had all the bells torn from me at once...even the small, cold, brass one marked i saw it all coming.   Without it, and without the baby in whose basket I'd piled all my hopes, I was - for the first time - bereft.
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Last night, listening to Cohen and time-travelling, I wondered about what seems to me now like the naive and sheltered discourse that surrounds pregnancy in our day and age and culture.  And I sang along, frog-voiced but loud, proud, forget your perfect offering.  there is a crack, a crack in everything.

We embody the crack in the perfect offering of modern pregnancy sold to us by Parenting Magazine and BabyCenter and What to Expect When You're Expecting.  We embody it because our children are not here to.

The logical conclusion, of course, to my stretched analogy is, then, that we are how the light gets in.  A part of me likes that.